Halo 3 UKReview

Share.

The fight is almost over, but is it legendary or an anti-climax?

By Simon Cauldry

Right, let's throw this out there right away. Halo 3's single player campaign is disappointing. There. Phew! Said it. For three good reasons I'll elaborate on in a minute. But before you frame letters to your MP, allow me to quickly qualify this and begin with a confession. I'm a card-carrying, bought-the-action-figure, tried-it-on-legendary, wasted-away-half-my-life-in-online-multiplay Halo saddo. Not read-a-Halo-novel mental, give me some credit, but you get the picture.

A couple of Halo 2 multiplay map favourites make a welcome return.

That doesn't mean I can't step out of my fanboy funk for a few hours and review a game objectively, that's how crusts are earnt round these parts, but on completing the single player mission, I quietly set down my controller, and found I was left slightly cold. And without sounding too childish, that's Halo's fault, not mine. The game's so big and unwieldly, the hype so planet-dwarfingly massive, the expectation so high, that I think any sane gamer's reaction when it doesn't turn out to be pound-for-pound the best game ever, is a tiny vacuum of empty in the pit of the stomach. And that's the problem with judging Halo. By any other PC or console standard this is exemplary gaming. By Halo's ridiculous, unattainably heavenly standards, it falls short. Don't panic, though. It gets gushy later.

Reason for single player disappointment one: It's too short. You'll gleefully stab that nipple-like X on your controller, select "normal" difficulty and play through to the homage-y final level and sombre final credits in around six hours if you're Halo proficient. And I'm not going to get into the whole game length debate, but by anyone's standards, this is too damn short. Crackdown? Eight to ten hours of nicely weighted and fun play. Bioshock? Around ten hours of story-led shooting. Halo? Almost half that. Boo&#Array;

Reasons for single player disappointment two: Graphically, it's underwhelming. Again, don't get me wrong, it's polished to today's required high def sheen, but Bungie has been a first party Microsoft developer for seven years now and is its Blue Ribband games constructor, so it's not unreasonable to expect this to be the eye candy graphical standard of the console. And Bioshock looks better. As does Heavenly Sword. God bless The Cell.

Forge means you can slap any item down anywhere in any level.

Reasons for single player disappointment three: The story is an unfathomable mess. Anyone have any clue whatsoever as to what occurred in Halo 2? Nope, us neither. Well Bungie carry on in that vein, with vital expositional dialogue covered over by explosions and music, alliances struck and undone with no real explanation and I'm sure I missed a couple of standout, blockbuster moments because I happened to be looking in the other direction. I know that cut-scenes are seen as slightly smelly gaming throwbacks nowadays, but if you want to push on a story, don't allow the player to wander off while your cranking up your exposition. Oh, and make sure you switch the subtitles on to make sure you take everything in.

Get through these disappointments, though, and you'll certainly crack through the single player with a smile on your face. It is pleasingly Halo 3.0, with the requisite smattering of new guns, new vehicles and new enemies. Much of the fighting is on a truly epic scale - there's an awesome boss battle (that for some reason the chaps at Bungie were refusing to acknowledge was a boss battle, Lord no) against a Covenant Scarab which hosts more AI-led individuals on screen - Covenant and Human - than the entire first level of the first Halo game. The 360 can crunch the kind of numbers to allow this to happen, and Bungie has absolutely exploited these resources to paint up some cracking set pieces on the Halo canvas. Microsoft politely asked us not to give away any plot spoilers, and we won't. If you want that, there are other corners of the interpipe, but I won't give too much away if I just say in passing you'll meet a few old friends and a few old enemies, too.